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Ships Save 650 Migrants at Sea

A flotilla of ships saved 668 migrants on Saturday from smugglers’ boats in distress in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Libya, Italian authorities said, bringing the week’s total of migrants plucked from the sea to a staggering 13,000 people.

The rescues by the Italian coastguard and navy ships, aided by Irish and German vessels and humanitarian groups, are the latest by a multinational patrol south of the Italian island of Sicily, AP reported.

The Irish military said the vessel Le Roisin saved 123 migrants from a 12-meter-long rubber dinghy and recovered a male body. A German ship patrolling to intercept smugglers’ boats also was involved in four separate rescue operations, the Italian coast guard said on Saturday evening.

With migrant shelters filling up in Sicily, the Italian Navy vessel Vega headed toward Reggio Calabria, a southern Italian mainland port, bringing 135 survivors and 45 bodies from a rescue a day earlier. The Vega was due to dock on Sunday.

Other survivors who arrived on Saturday in the Sicilian port of Pozzallo told authorities they had witnessed a fishing boat filled with” hundreds” of migrants sink on Thursday, a Save The Children spokeswoman, Giovanna Di Benedetto, told AP by telephone from Sicily.

According to survivors, two smugglers’ fishing boats and a dinghy set sail on Wednesday night from Libya’s coast. Di Benedetto said the survivors were among 500 or so aboard the one fishing boat that did not sink and the dinghy.

“All of this must be verified, of course,” said Di Benedetto, but if the survivors’ accounts bear out, as many as 400 people could have drowned, with only a very few of those on the vessel that sank able to reach the other boats.

Meanwhile, the MSF Sea group suggested the death toll from the last week could be as high as 900.

Authorities say many migrant boats in the past few years apparently have sunk without a trace in the Mediterranean, with the dead never found. Often the only news about them comes when family members in Africa or Europe tell authorities that their loved ones never arrived after setting sail from Libya.